THE TALK OF THE TOWN Islands that stand just offshore from the tip of the Dingle Peninsula, on Ireland's westernmost coast. It takes a minute be- fore a visitor, alighted from his parked Hertz high on a shoulder of Slea Head, can figure out that distant, silentlyarriv- ing and waning sliver, and feel cheered by the thought that it's only the repeated crash and fall of Atlantic breakers, per- haps :first born off Montauk, three thou- sand miles away-a wave from home. M05LEY' 5 MOVE5 W TER MOSLEY is sitting on a large white sofa in the double-height living room of his airy West Village apart- ment. The room is furnished with el- egant sparseness, and the window has an inspiring view of the Hudson. Mosley is a lanky, pale-tan, young-looking fortyish man with an open face. He thinks and speaks of himself as black, although his mother is white. His four novels, about Ezekiel (Easy) Rawlins, an endearing black Everyman in Los Angeles who al- most inadvertently becomes a private in- vestigator, have been critical and popu- lar successes. That success has brought authority, and authority combines with Mosley's sterling discipline to allow him time to work for a cause he has founded: the Open Book Committee, a project of the PEN American Center, of which he is a vice-president. Its purpose is to encour- age publishers to hire members of mi- nority groups. "A lot of black people read, more than anybody thinks," he says. "But the publishing industry is very, very white. We don't only need black people and Chicanos and Native Americans and Asians writing books- we need them editing books, and not only books by members of their own races but other people's books. We need to integrate, and one of the places to do that is where culture is created." When the conversation turns to Mosley's fiction, he admits that his new novel, "R.L.'s Dream," may trouble some of his fans, because it's a departure from his Easy novels. There's no par- ticular mystery about the deaths in it He smiles as he promises, "1' m not go- ing to kill off Easy-not for a while. I want him to become old." The new book tells the story of Soup- spoon Wise, a blues singer and guitarist from Mississippi. "I wanted to write about the blues, but the problem in writ- ing a novel about music is that words can't duplicate music-they have to make the language approximate what the music says. It's deeper than writing black dialect. I'm really trying to say how language expresses the heart-so that if you're Irish and read it you'll get it, too." ''RL.' s Dream" is dedicated to Mosley's father, who died in 1993, and whose pho- tograph appears on the dedication page. "I feel very Walter Mosley connected to my father, who was a great storyteller," Mosley says. "My father came from the part of Louisiana where the mUSIC was Creole, and he didn't grow up with the blues. But he knew the life. He could understand Soupspoon, an old man, long forgotten, near dying, be- ing saved by the most unlikely people. I gave a speech recently and told the kind of story that my father would tell, and people came up afterward and recalled storytellers in their own families. I find that, if you're a storyteller, your audience tells most of the story. When I give a reading and describe the white asphalt with lines of black tar next to the First African Baptist Church, some guy in the audience will say, 'I know that church. My uncle lived across the street' But I made up that church. And so did he." .,..,, ,.... f - ) .., , J HOT FLA5HE5 I T'S just too hot right now to do much of anything, so what should you do? This is a good moment to visit with friends who are smarter than you, be- cause the heat makes everyone stupId. How stupid, exactly? A week of intense heat in Manhattan gives everyone the al . f " B h " ment acuIty 0 , say, a aywatc ex- tra. When it's hot like this, you don't have to worry about dIscussing current events: people might want to read the newspaper, but during a heat spell they certainly don't want to touch it, because hot hands work hke glue on newspnnt. During heat waves, you realize that New York has six seasons: fall, Winter, taxes, spnng, summer, and the season of weird smells. That is six, isn't it? Oh, and re- member that controversy about the huge skyscraper proposed for Columbus 27 Circle, the one that you vowed to op- pose because it blocked so much sun- light-are you having second thoughts? Also, what are the health risks in eating nonfat frozen yogurt for more than two of your three daily meals? Now, if you're not too dazed, here is some summertime math. Let's say you need to travel from A to B. First, do the cab calculation: an available taxi is good for ten points, but an available taxi with its windows rolled down-which indicates that it probably has no air- conditioning-means you lose fifteen points, so what does that equal? And is that a greater or lesser sum than this sub- way equation: take the temperature of a subway station (approximately a hundred and fifty degrees) and subtract the tem- perature of an overly air-conditioned subway car (approXImately fifty-five de- grees) and then add twenty energy units if you have to walk up a flight of stairs leaving the station. No fair, right? O.K., then consider walking. What's the heat value of walking down a hot sidewalk mi- nus the incalculably small shade value of protruding window air-conditioners plus the incalculably small cooling value of the occasional air-conditioner drippings you can pretend are a gentle spring shower? Feeling faint? Well, you could look it up. Honestly, it's too hot to be Ironic. Forget irony. It is tempting to greet peo- ple these days with an ironic comment about the weather, but, given this heat- induced dumbness, you might acci- dentally sound sincere. You might say something enthusiastic about one of those dumb summer movies when you really meant to compliment the theatre on its superior climate control. It's get- ting very hard to think of clever hot- weather salutations, but don't despair: these are not the days for dry, witty rep- artee. In fact, these are not the days for dry anything. NEW YORK' 5 BOOK BIND N OT so long ago, Rudolph Giuliani revived a blustery mayoral tradi- tion and announced (With that mon- strous gaiety he sometimes affects), 'We can kick your city's ass." Undoubtedly, what Giuliani meant by his offer was that he was prepared to prove that big- gest IS best and that N ew York is best